Sunday, August 8, 2010

Laura Brown is a typical British teen writing in her diary about the year the UK decided to implement strict carbon rationing. Each resident is issued a card with a certain amount of credits and each has to make some hard choices about how to use them. Laura’s family doesn’t deal well with the changes (to say the least) – will everyone make it through 2015 alive?

While I liked the concept of a focusing on a family trying to transition from the freewheeling life they’ve always known to a more meager form of existence, the diary entries tend to ramble and there isn’t much in the way of an overreaching plot.

I did think Laura’s voice was extraordinarily well done, and I loved the way she could see the humor in the little things even as her family life starts to collapse. It often felt very much like a screwball comedy, which is very unusual for the genre, but it works.

I particularly like this passage from a section where Laura accompanies her parents on a survivalist camping adventure in the countryside:

Huh, I got totally bullied by a gang of ponies on the way back from the shop. I was innocently crossing a field when a squinty black pony shot out from under some trees and went for my pack of Munster Munch. And then a load of others came up behind him. It was dead scary. I had to surrender the Monsters and make a run for it. When I looked back they were all tearing at the plastic like piranhas. The countryside is so brutal. p 210

Umm…and that’s really all I have to say, other than I doubt I’ll read the sequel. My rating: 2 Zombie Chickens - Entertaining but not essential.